Strangers with the Same Dream Page 20

  Hannah smiled at him, her chin resting on their daughter’s head. She knew this was a triumph for David. She was encouraging him. He was pierced for a moment by love.

  Once, in the green hills of Samaria, a land of sheep and lush olive groves, he had found himself lost and stopped at an estate to ask his way home. David loathed these early settlers, the ones who had come at the start of the century and now lived no differently than Lebanese landowners, with the fellaheen slaving in their vineyards and new Arab villages erupting from the soil around them as they came from near and far looking for work. What about Jewish labour? Was this any way to build Zion?

  But the day had been so hot, and the man, who wore a blue silk kippah, had brought David into the house where a maid offered him a cool, milky drink she called lebeniya. A girl who must have been the man’s daughter, in a perfectly starched dress, played scales up and down the piano. Somehow, despite the stifling heat, there had been a cool breeze at the loose billowing curtains. The drink was sweet on David’s tongue. But it was that girl he often thought about, the girl with the plump pale hands on the piano keys, and the clean, shining hair.

  And it was she he imagined he was speaking to, convincing even, when he intoned the famous words, “This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in Egypt. All who are hungry, come and eat—”

  The only problem was that the meal was so meagre. What would that girl, who was used to a full plate, have thought? There was the usual pita, fried eggplant, gruel. David tried not to judge. The women were managing with very few supplies.

  The young halutzim seemed to relish most the chanting of the plagues—locusts, blood, darkness. In their voices David heard an eagerness to show they could relate, that they thought their own suffering was equal to that of their forefathers.

  Well, maybe it was. It was hard not to be moved—David felt a shiver as he spoke, his ears straining for the sound of Arab hoofbeats just as the Hebrews had listened for the sounds of the pursuing Egyptians in the ancient times.

  —

  After the Seder, Samuel came to him and said quietly, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  The men had gone out into the evening; the women were back doing the dishes.

  David waited.

  “It’s not on my own behalf,” the boy said.

  “Okay,” David answered.

  “I’m uncertain whether it’s something you need to hear,” Samuel said.

  David fidgeted. He could see Sarah across the yard, filling a watering can. Was she as beautiful as his phantom practising her scales? No. But almost.

  “What’s the meaning of confession?” Samuel said. His eyes were focused on something distant, as though he was addressing no one in particular. “And to whom does one confess? God? One’s self?”

  David sighed and gritted his teeth. “This is Pesach, not the Day of Atonement,” he reminded him.

  Sarah, he noted, was bending over, and he pictured coming up behind her, surprising her, so she would not have even a moment to protest. He stretched a calf muscle, an old injury that seemed to be returning. Samuel was usually a sweet boy. Why was he droning on like this? “Your allegiance is to the kibbutz,” David said. “To the group.”

  He could see that this was not the answer Samuel needed in order to cough up his secret. There was some magic password he was waiting for David to stumble on, which would then absolve him of whatever sin he feared he was committing. David did not want to participate.

  When Hannah approached he was relieved.

  The relief lasted briefly, however. The warm look they had shared at the Seder was gone. He could see she was angry with him again; he could tell, even before she spoke, that her words would have the glassy calm that was designed to camouflage fury. He tried to think what she might be mad about, but the options were both too vague and too numerous.

  She came and stood in front of him. She said nothing. He waited.

  “Do you know where Salam is?” she asked finally. Her right eyelid twitched almost imperceptibly, but it was a sign David knew well.

  Out of the corner of his eye David could see Samuel watching. The boy’s mouth was halfway open; there was still something he wanted to say. But David ignored him and shifted to angle his back to him. Finally Samuel slunk away.

  “Pardon me?” he asked his wife.

  Now she was glaring at him. She was close enough that he could smell her sweat.

  “Salam,” she said. “Your daughter’s doll.”

  A volley of feelings rose inside him: guilt, anger, guilt, annoyance, fever, guilt, heat. He did know where the doll was. Or he had once known. But he couldn’t remember.

  “Ruth says you have it,” Hannah said. Her voice rose at the end like she was asking a question.

  “She’s right,” David said. This was not Ruth’s fault. He did not want her doubted. “But I can’t think of where it is now.”

  “What do you mean?” Hannah snapped. “How many places could it be?”

  But David was telling the truth. All day he put on an act for the halutzim, a bravado that betrayed his true essence, but with Hannah he was far beyond that. With her, he could at least be himself.

  He tried to remember. He summoned an image of the dirty doll, stained and losing stuffing, but a shiver came over him, a tremor. He disciplined his body, refusing the weakness.

  Hannah’s hand slipped beneath her kerchief, massaging the back of her own neck.

  “I’m sorry,” he said instead. Sometimes an apology helped. But Hannah was not mollified.

  He said, “I have something to do,” although it was as clear as day that he had nothing to do, that this was just a shell of an excuse. David turned to leave. His wife did not respond.

  As he crossed the field he saw the pretty nurse Elisabeth. She was standing beside Shoshanna, their shoulders touching. Not Elisabeth, he corrected himself, but Esther. Her new boyish haircut was really a shame.

  CHAPTER 20

  ON MAY DAY THERE was gruel and eggplant again. Summer was coming, but Ruth was getting no better.

  She was getting much, much worse.

  David had gone to the infirmary and was shocked by her leg, swollen almost comically, and now with a blackness around the original wound. The flesh was dead, and it was rotting. It smelled putrid, like raw meat left out too long in the sun. He saw a fly crawling over it lazily, hungrily, and he bent down to fan it frantically away.

  A little moan came from Ruth’s pale face.

  “Abba,” she said.

  There was no hook that could pierce him more sharply than her high clear voice. Eretz Yisrael was his one true dream, and he wanted to populate it with workers, but the act of raising them in this land was so difficult. He had seen, back at Kinneret, a fetus lost halfway through the pregnancy due to malnutrition; Lenka had laboured and then delivered a clot of slippery blood that, on closer inspection, had eyelids and tiny little hands that might have worked the fields. He had seen the way Meyer’s woman had wanted nothing to do with him after their daughter was stillborn. And of course he had seen what had happened with Hannah, with his first child. Or, if not his first, then their first together. He did not believe in regret, yet regret was eating him from the inside out. He shuddered to think of how he had behaved, and he could feel how that emotional shudder led to the physical convulsions he was fighting off now with every breath. He refused to be hooked—by the kadachat, by his daughter, by the things that tied him down to the world of his body, where he could control nothing, where deep inside him there was a desperate need and he could not retreat and be safe inside his head.

  “Abba,” Ruth said again.

  In contrast to the swollen leg, the rest of her had wasted away, her skin white as cream, the blue veins on her eyelids standing out, nearly translucent. An image of that fetus flashed through his mind. He pushed it away.

  “Ahuva,” he said, and he bent forward to lift her up. But as he bent forward his head began to spin; the world tilted
and he laid a palm flat on the dirt floor to steady himself. There was a long moment when he thought he would have to lie down. The thought of being tended to, cared for, had an infinite appeal. He remembered his mother’s featherbed when he was a boy; he remembered being sick with the stomach flu and staying home from cheder, the pretty maid bringing him berries and cream with a silver spoon. But once he lay down here, beside his daughter, in the infirmary, he knew he would not get up again.

  He raised himself unsteadily and stood.

  “Abba,” Ruth pleaded. “Stay with me. Don’t leave.”

  There were fat tears on her cheeks now. David pretended not to hear her crying as he left the tent.

  Later, though, he went to find Hannah. She was sitting cross-legged beside the quinine tree with a play by David Pinsky open in her lap. He was glad to see she had not forgotten how to read. He lowered himself down beside her; when his knee touched hers he did not move it away.

  “What do you think?” he asked, and he did not have to say what he meant. They were both wondering, day and night, if the time had come.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

  David said, “It wouldn’t be us. We’d ask someone else. Yitzhak?”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Yitzhak couldn’t do it either,” Hannah said.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “Someone who doesn’t know her.”

  “Remember, with Igor…”

  They were both remembering how Igor had fought when the time came, even though he was an adult and had agreed beforehand to the amputation. They had given him a horse’s bit and as much whiskey as they had, until he was almost unconscious, but when the saw pierced the skin and then the muscle and then the bone, the look in Igor’s eyes was something David would never forget. And the sound from far inside him. Human beings were not built to withstand that kind of pain.

  “It saved him,” David said.

  “He was never the same.”

  “He was alive, though.”

  David touched his nose and squeezed his eyes closed. He was trying to imagine the circumference of Ruth’s femur inside her skin. There was a feeling rising inside him that he hoped was vomit but knew was really tears. He looked over at Hannah, her elbows on her crossed knees, her head in her hands. When she looked up there were tears on her face too. He reached over, tentative, and took her hand. She let him. They sat in the half-light that would be there for the rest of their lives if they went ahead with what they were considering.

  It was Hannah, finally, who said, “I can’t do it.”

  Relief crashed through David, hard as any wave. It was the decision he wanted but he could not be the one to say it. He couldn’t bear the responsibility.

  Hannah was stronger. She always had been.

  “Okay,” David said. “You’re right, Hannahleh.”

  “We’ll give her more time.”

  “Can we take her to Tiberias?”

  “The nuns could probably help,” said Hannah.

  “Let’s try that first.”

  Hannah nodded; it was agreed.

  “I’ll take her tomorrow,” David said.

  From the field they heard a motor dying, sputtering to life, dying again. David held Hannah’s hand a moment longer, then squeezed it and got to his feet. His knees popped. He arched his back. When he left the sun was starting to set and she was still sitting there, the Pinsky open in her lap.

  CHAPTER 21

  SARAH WAS WEARING a tailored blouse with a low neck and loose red sleeves. David had seen it before, he thought, but only now did he register it. What was striking was not that she looked beautiful wearing it—although she did—but that she looked unique. In the crowd of interchangeable halutzim she looked to be herself.

  A line from “Eshet Chayil,” the Sabbath poem that a man recites to his wife, came to David: “A woman of valour who can find? She is far more precious than jewels…All her household are clothed in scarlet.”

  There was an odd look on Sarah’s face, though, a pinched sort of anticipation, as though she had something to tell him but was trying to prevent it from leaving her own mouth.

  “Where are you coming from?” she asked.

  He did not want to tell her about his conversation with Hannah, so he said, simply, “The infirmary.”

  Sarah asked, “Was the doctor there?”

  David raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  Sarah tugged at her sleeve. “I want to ask him some questions,” she said. “How sick is he?”

  David didn’t answer.

  “You like the doctor,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, distracted, and then saw what he meant. “What? No!” She wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean?”

  “That day,” David said, although he knew he was being ridiculous. “When we were in the infirmary together.”

  He did not want to say he had seen the doctor’s hand on her shoulder, just lightly, but nor could he deny how he felt about it. “What were the two of you talking about?”

  Sarah widened her eyes in frustration. Clearly, she had something else she wanted to tell him, and she had finally worked up the nerve.

  “He was talking nonsense,” she said. She shut her eyes and pressed her forefingers against her temples.

  David knew he should let it go but he couldn’t help himself. “What kind of nonsense?”

  He imagined the doctor whispering English sweet nothings into Sarah’s ear, little American rhymes, love songs his father had long ago sung to his mother before conceiving him.

  “He told me you should feed Ruth mould.”

  This bald statement was so far from what David had been anticipating that he thought he had misheard. “Mould? What mould?”

  He remembered, now, overhearing something like this, but only very vaguely.

  “How should I know?”

  “Like from a rotten cheese?”

  “Exactly.” She hesitated. “I think.”

  There were tears were in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” David asked. All at once, peering more closely at her, he could see a kind of darkness closing in around Sarah, something she would not be able to resist for much longer.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  He touched the edge of the fence to steady himself. One of the posts was coming loose; he would ask Samuel to repair it.

  He looked up and saw the straight line of the Arabs’ stone houses they were now using to store gardening hoes, harnesses, sacks of grain. Behind the houses, there was the outline of the triangular tents, like so many beautiful women’s skirts. All this he saw by moonlight, while the night pressed in so there was no space between it and his body. The night did not distinguish the Arab air or the Jewish air or the last thin breaths his Bubbe had swallowed back home in Bessarabia.

  Sarah was looking at him.

  “You have to get rid of it,” he said.

  Sarah’s hand was flat against her stomach. David suddenly saw how gaunt she was, her cheeks caved in. He had the thought that the pregnancy would not last, that they were all so hungry it would not be viable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” she asked roughly, as though there were too many options to choose from.

  “For everything.”

  But Sarah’s voice had turned belligerent. She reminded him of Hannah.

  “What’s the point of being here? If we aren’t to have children?”

  “The point is for us to survive,” David said.

  Now there was an edge to his voice too. It was cresting over him, what he had not let himself know: he had seen this coming. All of Sarah’s crying had been leading somewhere. This, of course, was its final destination. There were the rubber sheaths at the Agency headquarters and David knew full well what they were for. He understood cause and effect. He was not like the Arabs who did not understand, for example, that the kadachat came not from the swamp itself, but from the pointed prick of a mosquito. He
cursed himself for falling into the gulf between things as they were and things as he wanted them to be, a gulf he was powerless against. Again.

  “You have to get rid of it,” he repeated. He ran his tongue over his sore tooth. “Look around you. We’re sick. We’re starving. What are we going to do with another child?”

  “We’ll raise it.”

  “Wait a year, maybe two.”

  “But you have a child.”

  “That’s different.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “I’ll bring it to the group,” he said.

  Sarah’s face contorted, like Dov’s had when the scalding water hit it, and the look of shock and rage reminded him again of his wife. “What business of the group’s is my pregnancy?” Sarah asked.

  “What business? It’s everyone’s business.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  He said, “The group will vote.”

  A strangled cry came from the back of Sarah’s throat.

  His hands clenched. Rubber sheaths or no rubber sheaths, she could have been more careful. Perhaps she had done this on purpose.

  “I’ll bring it to the group,” he said again. He didn’t say, It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “You know it isn’t like that,” Sarah said, her voice now like a small child pleading.

  “There’s nothing else to do,” David said, and in his confidence he almost convinced himself. There was another cry from the woman, like a pain of labour. The world spun. David lowered his hand to the fence post again to steady himself but it wobbled under his grasp.